Reid’s _Essays_ form, as it were, the inner court of the temple of which the Aberdonian _Inquiry_ is the vestibule. But the vestibule is a more finished work of constructive skill than the inner court, for the aged architect appears at last as if embarrassed by accumulated material. The _Essays_, greater in bulk, perhaps less deserve a place among modern philosophical classics than the _Inquiry_, notwithstanding its narrower scope, confined as it is to man’s perception of the extended world, as an object-lesson in the method of appeal to the common sense. In the _Essays_ an advance is made towards a finally ethical interpretation of man and the universe. We have no longer the light of letters to Lord Kames in this closing stage of Reid’s life; for Kames died in 1782. Reid’s retiring modesty deprived him of that large literary intercourse to which his philosophical position might otherwise have led. His correspondence with men eminent in letters or philosophy seems almost confined to Kames, the Gregories, Dugald Stewart, and Dr. Price. I find no trace of correspondence with his Aberdeen friends Campbell and Beattie, whose pursuits had so much in common with his own. But letters to Dr. James Gregory take the place in the ‘eighties’ which those to Lord Kames took in the ‘seventies’; they reveal an old age given to proof-sheets, scientific experiments, and benignant interest in social progress. One dated ‘Glasgow College, April 7, 1783,’ tells of the _Essays on the Intellectual Powers_ in the press:—‘I shall be much obliged if you will continue to favour me with your observations; therefore I have put off examining those you have sent until the manuscripts be returned, which I expect about the end of this month, along with Dugald Stewart’s observations.’ Again he writes in June:—‘I cannot get more copied of my papers till next winter, and indeed have not much more ready. This parcel goes to page 658. I believe what you have got before may be one-half of all I intend. The materials of what is not yet ready for the copier are partly discourses read in our Literary Society, partly notes of my lectures. Your judgment of what you have seen flatters me very much, and adds greatly to my own opinion of it; though authors seldom are deficient in a good opinion of their works. I am at a loss to express my obligations to you for the pains you have taken.’ He refers in another letter to what he regards as the source of the fashionable agnosticism against which his life was a continued philosophical protest:—‘I have often thought of what you propose—to give a History of the Ideal System and what I have to say against it, _by itself_; and I am far from being satisfied that it stands in the most proper place [in the _Essays_]. I have endeavoured to put it in separate chapters [_e.g._ Essay ii. ch. 7-15], whose titles may direct those who have no taste for it to pass over them. I observe that Bayle and others, who at the reformation of